1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for, and a method of, generating character information for display on a display apparatus, an apparatus for, and a method of, displaying the character information, a method of, and a system for, displaying a subtitle, and a subtitle generating apparatus destined for use to screen a digital movie.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, there has been widely prevalent a digital movie screening system in which a movie using no film but digital data as a picture source is projected on a large screen. The Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) of the industry group of major motion picture companies in USA proposed a digital movie standard (the home page of the LCC (DCI) at Web site address URL: http//www.dcimovies.com/ was on-line accessed on Apr. 28, 2005).
According to the digital movie standard proposed by the DCI, still pictures in a picture image format of 2000 (1920 H×1080 V) by 4000 (4096 H×2160 V) pixels are to be encoded at a rate of 24 pictures/sec on the basis of the JPEG 2000.
Also, the DCI proposed a specification under which subtitles to be superimposed on pictures are formed into a file separately from picture data and provided to users (movie theater) and the user combines the pictures and subtitles together for screening there.
The specification is under standardization in detail by the subcommittee “Digital Cinema Technology” (DC 28) of the Technology Committees of the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) (the home page of the SMPTE at Web site address URL:http://www.smpte.org/engineering_committees/technology_committees/ was accessed on Apr. 28, 2005).
A subtitle file provided as a data source for the digital movie screening system includes an XML file including text data and control data for the text data, and a font file for displaying the text data. The XML file has described therein a pointer to indicate a font file. The subtitle display apparatus reads font data in the font file as necessary for displaying a subtitle.